Current invention relates to smartcard and more particularly to multimedia cards (MMC) under SecureMMC standard. It allows starting, running and querying multiple applications in parallel/concurrently in a card connected to a host through a MMC bus. It has applications in the electronic, computing and telecommunication industries where MMC cards compliant with SecureMMC standard are fabricated and used.
The newly defined SecureMMC 2.0 protocol defines a method for APDU commands to be transported over the MMC bus using the MMC protocol. However, while keeping as close as possible to the current ISO7816 specification, limitations with respect to the logical channel management as specified in ISO7816 4 is also inherited.
While logical channel management as specified in ISO7816 4, allows for multiple applications to be running in parallel at the same time, the T=0 and T=1 transport protocol as specified in ISO7816 3, allow only one command to be send to one of the application at any one time (T=0 is the asynchronous half duplex character transmission protocol and T=1 is the asynchronous half duplex block transmission protocol). Thus even though multiple application are active, at any one time, only one of them is running.
For a device operating system that supports both logical channel and multithreading, the above constraints does not allow for efficient use of the device.